A Voice From An Immigrant
Chunyan Li Taishan
I will never forget the day when I first came to America because my life has never been the same. Everything was so different and strange that I didn’t know how to fix it. There were thousands of problems to overcome: language, life, study and learning about a different culture.
The first problem I encountered was the language. I have to communicate with different people every day here. Unfortunately, I can’t just speak Chinese all day, because most of the people here don’t understand Chinese. Although I have learned English for almost 9 years, I can’t understand what they are talking about a lot of the time. American English is different from British English which I had learned at school in my home country.
For living in America, money is the first thing people need. Money looks especially important in this country. Most of the people just care about money. When I started to study in high school, someone said I’d better go to work and earn more money so I could help my family afford a nice house and nice things. But I decided to go school because I know that I will only get low pay without technical skills and knowledge.
When I first came to school, everything was so difficult for me. I didn’t understand what the teacher said. Somebody laughed at me and it was so embarrassing. At that time, I swore my English would be better than them one day.
The way people study In the United States is different from China. In China, students have to study from morning to night. Once we go to high school, what we have to do is study and study. The goal for high school students is get a high score and then go to a top university. The parents have to pay a lot of money for their children’s education.
However, most of the American students don’t care about their score. They go to work and play most of the time, they do what they want. Some of them just show up once or twice a month. Sometimes I don’t want to go to school too, but I still force myself to go because I know if I have a beginning, I will have a second chance.
I not only study for my future, but I really like to study. For my exertion, my English and all my other subjects are better and better day by day. I didn’t speak English before, even though I knew how to say something sometimes. After I went to the Welcoming Center in our school, I started to talk to the others in English with Ms. Jennifer’s help. Now I can hear and speak English in my usual life. After that, I realized that if I don’t speak English, I would never know it, no matter how well I read and write.
Besides studying, I have to work to earn some money. After all, it is the thing that I really need. I used to work in a factory during the summer when I first came to this country. I didn’t know anything about the people in this country yet. After working there, I began to believe that people were always lying, no matter man or woman, American or Asian. A Vietnamese girl once said to everybody that her mother operated a cloth factory, but her sister said they had a hotel. The fact is both of them are illegal. Therefore, when somebody tells me something, I have to think about if their words are true or not.
I work in a coffee shop every weekend and am very happy that I can work and study. I still just know a little of the American culture. There are so many races and they have so many manners. For example, if someone sneezes in public, and he doesn’t say, “Excuse me” then everybody would stare at him. That is so different from my country.
In a word, although it is very hard to start a new way of life in the US, I have a lot of opportunities that I lack in my mother country. I believe I will have a better life if I try my best.
Did You Know...
The Social Security Administration estimates that undocumented immigrants contribute between $6 and $7 Billion in Social Security taxes that they will never be able to claim.
